It's The Future, Stupid

I wasn't going to post today 'cos I'm busy, but I can't resist...

There's an update on the combat plans for space game SFZ, as well as new screenshots. Direct from the DevBlog:

After experimenting a bit we decided against making sfz combat based on fast reaction time and dogfight navigation, which quickly leads to frustrating "where is the enemy" problems. Instead weapons won't have to be aimed manually, they'll work like turrets, and if the enemy is in range you will be able to hit him without effort.



The deciding factor in combat will be stuff like weapon ranges and strengths and weaknesses of different weapons against different shield-types, homing missiles and counter-measures, maybe also a bit of energy management. This makes positioning, tactics and equipment a more interesting component.

I can't stress how much I agree with this. Think about it, it's set in the future. Auto-tracking should be a given. Surely space combat will be about decision making not faster-than-light reactions, so it's nice to see they are emphasising this and reducing the efforts required to target enemy ships.

Anyway, they still have a long way to go but it's nice to see well considered design decisions early on and, if they can get some models the quality of those frequently contributed to Vega Strike, they will have a very good game indeed if they can execute their plans.

No sooner had I posted about 8 Kingdoms yesterday, than somebody commented with a link to a Ubuntu .deb they had created, so have a go. I did, although it did not hold my attention for too long (it's late, I'm busy, etc) but it looked good from what little I saw of it. Not quite my style of game - seems much more rooted in table top war games than I like - but should definitely interest quite a few stategy fans.

Not game specific, but this online book on producing open source software is a very good resource for anybody running an open source project. Developers should check it out.

Another good resource, for open source friendly licensed music, is Jamendo.com so anybody looking for music for their game might want to check that out.